Microsoft Has Resorted to Selling Anti-Google Coffee Mugs

Google’s Paul Buchheit reportedly came up with the company’s now-famous “Don’t Be Evil” motto at a meeting in early 2000, when Google was a scrappy startup taking on the big bad masters of the Internet, including Microsoft. Here’s how Buchheit explained it years later:

It just sort of occurred to me that “Don’t be evil” is kind of funny. It’s also a bit of a jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent.

Microsoft may have a point about Google spinning its users' data into billions of advertising dollars. Then again, does anyone doubt that Microsoft would have gladly done the same, had it not been beaten to the punch?

In the corporate world, unfortunately, the moral high ground tends to be a little like a “moral victory” in sports—it’s what you settle for when you can’t capture the actual high ground.